Ex-Google Wallet boss Bedier becomes PayRange director

Former Google Wallet chief Osama Bedier has turned up as a director at PayRange, a startup that builds dongles that can be attached to vending machines to enable them to accept mobile payments.

The move was revealed in SEC filings, spotted by GeekWire, that also show that the Portland-based company has raised $2.6 million in funding.

Google poached Bedier in early 2011 from PayPal to head up its efforts to break the mobile money market but he quit after two years in the job during which the operation failed to take off.

He has since kept a toe in the payments market as a director of WePay and Qiwi and an investor in Coin.

Founded by Paresh Patel, PayRange has designed a dongle that can be plugged into vending machines so that customers can make purchases through mobile apps. The dongle will begin shipping later this year, selling for $49 with the company also taking a 3.95% slice of transactions.

Comments: (1)

Their dongle is unlikely to include GSM function (it's hard to get a decent signal strength inside a vending machine without an external antenna).

Most likely, they use Bluetooth or WiFi Direct and do all the processing in the cloud. That means they rely on the Net connection. I am not sure about the US, but in the UK most vending machines are located in "hard to reach" places with poor GSM reception.

Other than that, it's a cool concept (if they know how to target that fragmented market).